Century-old headstones cast long shadows by the time Freddie Johnson’s Ford Ranger pulled into the Green Hill Cemetery in Frankfort. He had driven straight from work at Buffalo Trace Distillery, where his extensive bourbon expertise and passion for history have earned him legendary status as one of the distillery’s most sought-after tour guides.
It’s been a long week, and an even longer Friday, with a record-setting number of guests at the distillery. That’s why he was late, Freddie said, but he wasn’t flustered. He looked at ease, glad to be there among the headstones, the sunken graves and the unkempt grass on a late September afternoon.
He was there to meet Nick Laracuente, an archaeologist who advises on the upkeep and restoration of the cemetery, which was established in 1865. Like many small cemeteries scattered throughout small-town America, Green Hill is desperately underfunded and under-maintained. The $10,000 it receives from the city this year, Freddie said, will barely keep the grass cut.
The issue is personal for Freddie, as members of his family are buried at Green Hill. But it’s not just family interest that drives him. Preserving Green Hill Cemetery is about respect for the past and honoring those who came before—all of them, including Kentucky Civil War veterans of the United States Colored Troops, who are honored with a 10-foot-tall monument, the only monument of its kind.
Challenges at the cemetery run wider and deeper than landscaping. Take the pauper’s field, for instance. A swath of green space is riddled with the unmarked graves of the poor. The only sign of their final resting place may be a dip in the grass where a grave has collapsed. Even marked graves are at risk. Headstones sink over time; vandals and errant lawnmowers knock them over.
When Buffalo Trace approached Freddie about rebranding its line of soft drinks with his name, he struck a deal to donate a portion of the proceeds to benefit the upkeep of the cemetery. On Aug. 17, the company presented him with a check representing the first of those earnings—nearly $12,000. But the Freddie’s Old Fashioned Soda line is “just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. Freddie’s greater dream is to secure enough donations so that he can endow a fund to restore and maintain the cemetery in perpetuity.
Just a few days before he met with Nick, I asked Freddie what connected his worlds—what is the common thread binding together his love of bourbon heritage, his passion to preserve local history, and his deep respect for those who have gone before?
“There’s a passage in the Bible that haunts me,” he told me after one of his tours at Buffalo Trace. “It says, ‘Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.’ That’s what this is all about.”
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Laracuente, an archaeologist and historic preservationist, became an adviser for the Green Hill project while he was working for the state historic preservation office. (He now works as an archivist at Buffalo Trace.) Nick got to know Freddie through his side job in bourbon archaeology and through the 2018 bourbon documentary Neat. Through his state job, Nick became an expert on historic cemeteries. As he bonded with Freddie over bourbon, he also became a go-to resource for advice.
“Before I knew it, I became a regular call for him,” Nick told me. “He’d text me at all hours of the day whenever a new thing popped up.”
Nick’s role is primarily that of an adviser, and he’s helped create a strategy for the long-term preservation of Green Hill Cemetery. Some of the funds earned from Freddie’s Old Fashioned Soda will be spent—likely before the end of the year—on a ground-penetrating radar survey to analyze a swath of blank space that hides unmarked graves.
“Where we’re coming at it from is that, before you can do long-term management of the cemetery, you need a map of the cemetery, and you need to know what’s there and what isn’t,” Nick said.
A passion to preserve history drives Freddie’s work at Green Hill, where he serves as co-chair of the cemetery’s board of trustees. But phrases like “preserving history” don’t capture the immediacy of his mission. He’s driven by a sense of duty, an obligation to do right by the past. “It’s honoring those that came before us, celebrating their achievements, not letting stories be forgotten or brushed under the rug,” Nick said. “That drives him in bourbon; it drives him in the cemetery project.”
Jeanette Walker, chair of the cemetery’s board of trustees, has collaborated with Freddie for about 15 years. She said Freddie’s dedication is, at least in part, a product of how they both were brought up. “We were raised to listen to the old stories, the history of Frankfort and the history of the cemetery,” she said. “When we were growing up, some things they put in your head they expected us to do—to be a leader in the community, somewhere, somehow.”
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As a tour guide, Freddie’s enthusiasm and authenticity are palpable. It’s one reason distillery guests love him, according to Matt Higgins, Freddie’s supervisor at Buffalo Trace. “He’s very humble, he’s genuine, he cares deeply about what he does and the people he’s doing it for, whether that’s giving tours or taking care of Green Hill Cemetery,” Matt said. “He’s all in.”
Noah McMahon, a California-based philanthropist who met Freddie during a tour, helped create a fund to house charitable donations to support Green Hill Cemetery. Noah said Freddie’s enthusiasm and passion for the project made it irresistible.
“Freddie is not like anyone else,” he told me over the phone. “I think bourbon is the vehicle through which he connects with people, but I think his purpose is bigger than bourbon, because he cares about people as individuals, and he wants people’s lives to be better.”
During his tours at Buffalo Trace, Freddie asks guests to “look beyond the obvious.” He loves to point out details like the practical differences between white oak (barrel staves) and red oak (rickhouse framing). He gets excited when talking about the distillers of the Kentucky frontier—they were “arborists, engineers; they understood the rotation of the earth.” He points out the date on the barrels (they were all filled on Jan. 5, 2007), but the colors change from top to bottom.
He speaks reverentially about “the old whiskey guys” like Elmer T. Lee, Lincoln Henderson and Jimmy Russell. “You would never know who they were, because they didn’t boast about it,” he told a tour group. “They just blended into the background.” In other words, you had to look beyond the obvious.
What would it mean to look beyond the obvious when looking at Freddie?
Seventy-five-year-old Freddie Johnson is a Frankfort native, a third-generation distillery employee, and a 2018 Bourbon Hall of Fame inductee. His compelling family story and deep Frankfort roots have made him a legend in the bourbon world. He often speaks of his grandfather, Jimmy Johnson Sr., and his father, Jimmy Johnson Jr., who preceded him at the distillery.
A keystone of Freddie’s story is what he calls “a promise made, a promise kept.” As a young man, he moved away from Frankfort to work for AT&T, exhibiting early talent he’d shown in electronics. He was part of a management development program that moved him and his family from city to city every few years, including New York, Newark and Atlanta. Early in his career, his father called him with a request. Jimmy Johnson Jr. wanted Freddie to promise that, if he ever got the chance, Freddie would become the third generation of the Johnson family to work at the distillery. The second part of the promise was more somber.
“He said, ‘Oh, and by the way, since you’re coming back, should anything happen to me, would you be my caregiver?’ ” Freddie said. “That’s when I understood. He was saying, ‘When I call you, I want you to come home.’ ”
When the call came, almost 20 years ago, Freddie answered. He took early retirement to care for his father as well as his brother, who both were terminally ill. He also started working at Buffalo Trace in 2002, just as he’d promised. “Sometimes you do things not because you have to, but because it’s the right thing to do,” he said, his eyes above his mask welling with tears.
The stresses of caregiving played a role in ending Freddie’s marriage, which already had been strained by years of constantly moving for work. But his promise made and his promise kept have indelibly formed the way Freddie sees himself. They are key to understanding how he sees the world.
“That promise, coming back, the three generations of Johnson family working here—it’s cumulative,” Nick said. “There’s nobody quite like him. It was a pivotal moment, that promise.”
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At the cemetery, I watched as Freddie brushed yellowed grass clippings off the top of a grave marker. “Allan should be here somewhere,” he said, squinting at the emerging letters. “Yeah, I think he’s here.”
Allan was Freddie’s half-brother, who died of a disease—Freddie thinks it might have been cholera—at just 4 months old. Before Freddie cleared it, the grave marker was so caked with grass that a visitor might have missed it entirely. “You can see what we’re up against,” he said, straightening his back.
Green Hill Cemetery is the problem of history in miniature—not here, not there but perched precariously between this world and the next; a final holdout in the losing game of memory. I’m reminded of a line from Wendell Berry’s poem “The Record”: “I know the panic of that wish to save the vital knowledge of the old times […].”
Freddie, too, knows the wish to save, but I don’t think he’s panicked. He shouldn’t be. For more than two decades, he’s done his part. Every time he tells a story at the distillery, makes a connection with a guest, or identifies a forgotten grave, he saves knowledge by sharing it.
Freddie Johnson has dreamed dreams. It’s up to us to see the vision.